Senior Sustaining & Forward Deployed Engineer

About Us

Abacus Insights is transforming how data works for health plans. Our mission is simple: make healthcare data usable, so the people responsible for care and cost decisions can act faster, with confidence.

We help health plans break down data silos to create a single, trusted data foundation. That foundation powers better decisions—so plans can improve outcomes, reduce waste, and deliver better experiences for members and providers alike. Backed by $100M from top investors, we’re tackling big challenges in an industry that’s ready for change. Our platform enables GenAI use cases by delivering clean, connected, and reliable healthcare data to support automation, prioritization, and decision workflows—and it’s why we are leading the way.

Our innovation begins with people. We are bold, curious, and collaborative—because the best ideas come from working together. We embrace the thoughtful use of AI and automation to drive innovation and efficiency, and we look for individuals who are curious and adaptable—those excited to leverage emerging technologies to enhance how we work—while keeping human insight, connection, and our clients at the center of every decision.

Ready to make an impact? Join us and let’s build the future together.

About the role 

The Senior Sustaining & Forward Deployed Engineer is a senior individual contributor responsible for production operations, incident response, and post‑launch system reliability across Abacus Insights’ platform.

This role blends:

SRE and production operations

SWAT-style deep technical problem solving

Forward‑deployed, customer‑facing technical work

Hands‑on software development and automation

You will own the most complex, ambiguous, and high‑impact production issues, particularly those involving AWS infrastructure, Databricks workloads, and large‑scale data pipelines. You will work directly with customers on escalations and deployments, while ensuring learnings are translated back into durable product and platform improvements.

This is a hands-on role. You are expected to lead technically during incidents, debug live systems, and write production code where it meaningfully improves reliability and operability.

Your day to day

Production Operations & Incident Response

Act as a senior technical escalation point during production incidents

Lead real-time incident triage, mitigation, and recovery efforts

Drive root cause analysis (RCA) with a focus on systemic, long-term fixes

Identify recurring failure patterns and push for architectural or operational improvements

Partner with Customer Success and Engineering to manage customer impact during incidents

Sustaining Engineering & Post‑Launch Ownership

Own post-launch reliability, stability, and operational quality of core systems

Investigate and resolve complex field issues and production defects

Ensure fixes developed during incidents or customer escalations are up streamed into the core product

Improve operational readiness of services through better runbooks, monitoring, and alerting

Reduce operational toil by converting repeated manual work into automation

Forward Deployed / Customer‑Facing Engineering

Engage directly with strategic customers to solve real-world, production-grade technical challenges

Support complex deployments, integrations, and escalations in customer environments

Act as a trusted technical partner to customers during high-impact issues

Translate customer learnings into concrete product, platform, and operational improvements

Contribute to reusable tools, playbooks, and best practices that accelerate future deployments

AWS & Databricks Technical Expertise

Serve as a subject matter expert for AWS-hosted production systems

Troubleshoot and resolve issues across:

AWS compute, storage, networking, IAM, and security

Databricks jobs, clusters, and Spark-based data pipelines

Debug performance degradation, scalability issues, job failures, and data correctness problems

Partner with platform and data teams to harden systems for reliability, scale, and operability

Software Development & Automation

Write production-quality code to:

Automate operational workflows

Improve reliability and observability

Eliminate manual intervention and reduce incident frequency

Contribute primarily in Python, with exposure to JVM-based systems as needed

Review code with a strong emphasis on operability, resiliency, and maintainability

Advocate for “build it so it can be operated” engineering standards

Technical Leadership & Collaboration

Provide technical leadership without formal authority, influencing design and operational decisions

Mentor engineers through pairing, reviews, and incident leadership

Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, Data, and Customer teams

Operate effectively in high-pressure, ambiguous environments, especially during customer-impacting incidents

 

What you bring to the team 

10+ years of experience in software engineering, SRE, sustaining engineering, or production operations

Deep hands-on experience operating production systems in AWS

Strong experience troubleshooting Databricks and large-scale data platforms

Proficiency in Python and experience building production services or tooling

Strong understanding of:

Distributed systems

Incident management and RCA practices

Monitoring, alerting, and observability

CI/CD Pipelines that leverage Infrastructure as Code.

Proven ability to own problems end-to-end, from detection to permanent resolution

Excellent communication skills, especially during incidents and customer escalations

Ability to work backward from customer impact to root cause across systems and codebases, delivering fixes in environments with minimal documentation.

Strong instinct for operational risk, with the ability to proactively identify failure modes and harden systems before they impact customers.

What we would like to see, but not required: 

Experience in healthcare, health insurance, or regulated data environments

Familiarity with:

Kubernetes (EKS), EMR, Lambda

Spark internals

Snowflake or similar data warehouses

Experience with FHIR, MDM systems, or entity resolution

Prior experience in SWAT, escalation engineering, or tiger-team roles

Experience contributing to or operating within SRE/on-call programs

 

Compensation: Compensation for this role is based on experience, skills, and location, and includes base salary plus eligibility for performance bonuses and equity grants.

 

What you’ll get in return:

Unlimited paid time off – recharge when you need it

Work from anywhere – flexibility to fit your life

Comprehensive health coverage – multiple plan options to choose from

Equity for every employee – share in our success

Growth-focused environment – your development matters here

Home office setup allowance – one-time support to get you started

Monthly cell phone allowance – stay connected with ease#LI-MS1

Our Commitment as an Equal Opportunity Employer

As a mission-led technology company helping to drive better healthcare outcomes, Abacus Insights believes that the best innovation and value we can bring to our customers comes from diverse ideas, thoughts, experiences, and perspectives. Therefore, we dedicate resources to building diverse teams and providing equal employment opportunities to all applicants. Abacus prohibits discrimination and harassment regarding race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.

At the heart of who we are is a commitment to continuously and intentionally building an inclusive culture—one that empowers every team member across the globe to do their best work and bring their authentic selves. We carry that same commitment into our hiring process, aiming to create an interview experience where you feel comfortable and confident showcasing your strengths. If there’s anything we can do to support that—big or small—please let us know.